Some Thoughts On Spoilers

Mono culture gonna mono culture

When the climactic seventh Harry Potter book was released on July 21, 2007, I was at sleepaway camp in NorCal. Up at camp we didn’t have cell phones or regular phones or computers or newspapers or TV or even radio. The only way to get a message to or from the outside world was by letter. Not unlike the kids at Hogwarts, come to think of it. But Amazon.com delivered to camp, and a number of campers had made arrangements to get The Deathly Hallows the moment it dropped. I was happy to live “in the moment” with my bunkmates, and then devour the book once I got home, but there were kids who sat out arts and crafts and unit swim to finish the whole thing in like three days.

I forget if this rule was ever made official, but there was a camp-wide agreement that no one would try to steal the books from the kids who had them, and the kids who had them wouldn’t say anything about what happened. It 100% worked. A girl in my cabin named Sarah read a couple chapters every day and didn’t say a word. Respecting everyone’s Harry Potter process may seem like a small thing, and it was, but it was also emblematic of the community up there. We took care of each other. The social contract was strong.

Then, on the last day, as we boarded the buses that would take us home, a boy broke a rule. Again, a small thing, but leaving camp is really emotional for kids, and I think he panicked. He wanted to sit with his friends on my bus, which he wasn’t assigned to, and an assistant director had to basically drag him away. When the boy finally reached the door, embarrassed and angry, he turned around to the 60 or so millennial tweens and yelled, “Fred Weasley dies!”

To this day, one of the most spiteful things I have ever seen a person do.

A collective moan and cries of “no!” rang out. Both for Fred and ourselves. We’d been so close! We were mere hours away from accessing Barnes and Noble and reading the ending of the most impactful series of our young lives! But the real world had encroached too far. The session was over, the magic was gone.

I think about this moment whenever conversations crop up over the ethics of “posting spoilers,” a debate that heats up every Sunday night when Appointment TV comes on: most recently, Succession, which came to its own finale on May 28. The fight broke out in earnest when Logan died and a number of people saw tweets about it before they’d watched the episode. And when I tell you the reactions were overblown…a girl I follow tweeted a fake obit the LA Times ran, she got a dozen vicious, horrible, rude messages from strangers. It wasn’t even her post! She posted a thing that was already online!

And the righteousness. People sincerely believed that if you dared express a single Succession thought before 9pm on the West Coast, you were violating the Rules of the Internet out of a selfish desire for clout. You didn’t care about other people. You were a Republican, basically. Never mind that Succession episodes are available at the same time coast-to-coast and that looking at Twitter is, you know, optional. The discourse got so intense it inspired a strike sign.

On the flip side, atop an almost equally high horse, were those who argued that it was selfish to think that others should withhold their own takes and jokes and ideas to create a little bubble for their followers who happened to be out on Sunday nights, too busy to watch but not too busy to scroll Twitter. Blah blah blah.

Personally, I think we should not expect the world to bend around us and our preferences. I think it’s okay for people to live-tweet a show when it airs, and not wait an arbitrary 48 or 72 hours to make their memes. But also, you shouldn’t yell “Fred Weasley dies!” because that’s being a jerk. Mostly, I think that if you are over the age of 18 and you are upset about a spoiler, and that upset-ness lasts longer than five minutes and causes you to rage-tweet about it, you’re acting like a huge loser and you need to go have sex.

(FWIW, the Succession moment in particular upset people because it’s usually not a twist-y show. Viewers know not to check Twitter when House of the Dragon is on, and not to talk about Marvel movie post-credits scenes for like a week, because those protocols there have been set. But Succession upset its own norms. Okay, now I’m hopefully done writing about that show in this newsletter forever.)

(wait one more thing. The Succession finale was good. If you thought it was bad, you’re unfortunately incorrect.)

The assumption behind having spoiler warnings is the generally accepted idea that there is something uniquely valuable about the first time that a person interacts with a story, when they don’t know what happens. And at the very least, people should have the option to be able to preserve that. Go in blind, as they say.

In some cases, it’s obvious why. The first time you read a whodunnit, you can test yourself, see if you can figure out who did it before the detective does. Any story with a mystery element — or even an element of confusion — benefits from the viewer…not knowing what’s going on. Only having the information the writer provides, in the order they provide it. See: Memento. Or any other Nolan flick.

But the best proof that The First Time has a special power isn’t thinking back to moments when you were shocked, but watching a friend watch something you’ve seen, but they haven’t. It’s totally delightful. There are hundreds of TikToks of people recording their partners “watching THAT scene” for the first time, be it an outrageous moment from Twilight (the entire battle was a dream!) or the tragic death of…insert character here. When I watched Se7en with my friend Liz, I actually paused it at the end to ask her what she thought was in the box. And you only get that once.

SPOILER: GWYNETH’S HEAD.

(Don’t worry, that’s not the biggest twist in the movie. The twist is who the killer is and I won’t tell you! Unless you ask me!)

But taking for granted that a well-executed twist is undeniably awesome, most of us would agree, I think, that if the movie (or whatever the thing is) doesn’t hold up on a rewatch, if it’s not enjoyable even knowing The Answer At The End, it’s not very good. I know a number of people who, after the Big Reveal in the first season finale of The Good Place, went back and watched it from the start to see if it actually tracked. Ideally, knowing the twist should make your second or even third viewing just as enjoyable as the first, since you’ll see clues and foreshadowing you didn’t notice or understand before. I would even say that if your story is well and truly solid…a spoiler should impact it very little.

If I could go back in time to any movie screening in history, I would sit in the front row on opening day of The Empire Strikes Back, and turn around in my seat and watch the audience learn that Vader is Luke’s father. The filmmakers understood the shock value of this particular twist, and went so far as to shoot the scene with a different line (“Obi-Wan killed your father”) so no one on set could leak it. Handy that Vader’s mouth doesn’t move and all his lines had to be dubbed anyway!

(I think the closest I’ll ever get to experiencing this moment is the first time I saw Avengers: Endgame, when all the dead heroes come back to life. Not a twist, really, since it’s part of the plan, but a very cool moment in the theater.)

Time-travel aside, I don’t remember if I was ever shocked to learn Anakin’s true identity, because I started watching Star Wars so young that I’d internalized its lore before I could really track the plot. (And of course, everyone in the English-speaking world has heard that quote.) Did that diminish my enjoyment? No.

People watch Titanic knowing the ship will sink. The ending of Romeo and Juliet is the sixth line in the play. There’s nothing that kid on the bus could have yelled that would have made me not want to read The Deathly Hallows. I was in.

(Conversely, I got confused about the journal and the book and thought Into The Wild was written by Christopher McCandless, so when he died at the end of the movie, which everyone else knew was coming, I was like, wait, but he has to live and write the book????)

But there is one kind of buzz that has truly spoiled certain experiences for me: hype. The first time I saw Little Miss Sunshine, I kept waiting for the part where it would turn into the best movie of the year. And when it never did…what a twist? Revisiting it, the movie is very good, but it had been so over-praised by peers that it was almost ruined. Same with innumerable books and shows and comedy specials and foods and classes and songs. And come to think of it, the entire college experience. Expectations are waaaaaaay too high there.

(I’ve heard similar “hey, we should be honest that this thing has pros AND cons” arguments re: motherhood, but that feels like a topic for another day.)

I guess what it comes down to is: do your best to tune out not just spoilers but also almost anything didactic on a piece of art you haven’t interacted with yet and are considering trying out.

Except, you can trust me when I say that Succession takes a couple episodes to get into, and yes, it’s just a lot of business and phone calls. And ******* gets the company.

Spoiled,

Lizzie